This major beauty brand is switching to biodegradable packaging

The road to conscious living and sustainability is not an easy one; it means foregoing cheap and easy conveniences and finding eco-friendly alternatives—something we all know isn’t the easiest (or most affordable) of things to do. Consumers, however, are growing weary of the stresses and negative impacts we’re making on the environment; the market for sustainably produced goods has grown substantially over the last few years, so much so that large corporations (i.e. the people who have the means to influence what consumers purchase and, consequentially, how they affect the environment) are beginning to practice it as well.

The beauty industry is, perhaps, one of the markets where eco-friendly products and practices are most obviously applicable. The Body Shop, for example, has been an advocate of recyclable and biodegradable packaging, as well as anti-animal testing since its creation. Of the thousands of brands worldwide, L’Oréal is the most recent beauty giant to make a step towards sustainability, having just recently unveiled a new line of eco-friendly products under a new brand called Seed Phytonutrients.

Developed by L’Oréal CEO Shane Wolf (who is also a farmer apparently), the brand was conceived from a desire to create a positive impact on the well-being of the consumers and the environment. As the name implies, the brand’s core ingredient is seeds—heirloom seeds, to be precise, which produce more nutritious crops while preserving the genetic diversity of plants compared to hybrid or GMO seeds. The brand takes sustainability one step further by sourcing their seeds from organic famers around the U.S.

In order to reduce the amount of chemicals used in production, Seed Phytonutrients uses a cold-press method to extract the nutrients from the seeds. And apart from being “free”—gluten-free, paraben-free, sulfate-free, and cruelty-free, that is—their products are also supposedly 93 to 100 percent natural.